


A Spirit of Mercy

by willowbilly



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: 12 Days of Carnivale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Character Death Fix, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Goodsir Lives, Implied/Referenced Amputation, Starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 20:51:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17087525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: The Tuunbaq catches Hickey's group of mutineers as they are fleeing Terror Camp. Goodsir is caught with them.





	A Spirit of Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> For the 12 Days of Carnivale prompt "a time of miracles."

Goodsir would have thought that being abducted from the camp with a rifle jabbing into the small of his back and chaos and death all around him would have been the most terrifying portion of events.

But, really, it is when he sees the Tuunbaq barreling out of the mist and right for him for the second time that day.

He's in the traces alongside poor Mr. Diggle, who appears as bewildered and scared as he is, when they hear the footsteps. One set of human feet, and the great, lumbering cacophony of the bear's, shaking the ground at a rolling gallop.

Hickey calls them to a stop and instructs Armitage and the others who are armed to prepare to fire. It is impossible to tell from which direction the Tuunbaq will come from with how the sound is thrown by the fog and the rocks. Goodsir rids himself of the traces and shrinks back against the bow of the sledge, craning his neck to peer back over it.

It's Tozer who's led it to them. Unlike Mr. Collins, he appears absolutely horrified, his face devoid of all color and the unruly thatch of his ruddy hair swept entirely back from his brow with how fast he is going. He's approaching at a dead run, the rifle up against his chest and his whole body inclined forwards, and the beast is still gaining on him three times as quickly, the dreadful, pale mass of it detaching from the mist and growing ever larger. The rocks themselves skitter and sunder beneath the thunderous weight of its feet, and its mouth is a black, bellowing maw, its muzzle stained with gore.

 _“Fire,”_ Tozer shouts, hoarse and desperate with the hulking thing right on his heels. A stray shot from the first meager volley catches him in the neck and he drops, choking on his own blood, his eyes wide in shock. The Tuunbaq only pauses to leap upon his back, crushing him down and ripping his head off with one swipe of its mighty forepaw. Tozer splatters beneath the claws like a melon.

Des Voeux breaks and flees, and the Tuunbaq wheels around the boat and catches him, too. Mashes him into the earth.

Goodsir grabs Diggle by the shoulder. “Into the boat, into the boat, Mr. Diggle,” he says, but the man is petrified, and it takes precious seconds for Goodsir to budge him. The Tuunbaq slaughters several more as they are scrambling over the side, and from the corner of his eye he sees Hickey slash the back of someone's knee with a knife and kick him into the Tuunbaq's path to buy himself a bit of time.

Goodsir hunkers down as small as he can once he is inside the flimsy protection of the wood. He cannot see anything outside of the boat besides the blank sky, but he can hear the shots, and the screaming, and the awful, meaty squelching, and the crack of bone; the sounds of dismemberment and disembowelment are all the more horrible for his familiarity with them, and for the less familiar shrieks of agony which accompany them.

There is a momentary lull, and into this Hickey speaks, his voice breathless but smooth over the inhumanly deep, growling breathing of the monster.

“Wait,” says Hickey, for all the world as if the creature can understand him, and Goodsir can imagine him with that ingratiating false earnestness on his face, with his hand outstretched to put his raised palm between himself and the implacable thing which he wishes to appease. “You—”

Hickey never completes whatever it is he means to say. His death is loud and messy and Goodsir reflexively squeezes his eyes shut but cannot move to cover his ears, and is too afraid to do so even if he could.

A resounding quiet follows.

It stretches on so long that even Diggle's harsh panting levels out, and he relaxes slightly beside Goodsir, his body unable to maintain the tension.

Goodsir fumbles for Diggle's hand, and Diggle grips him in return, clasping tight in silent camaraderie. In wordless, cautious hope.

And then Diggle's hand is ripped from Goodsir's as Diggle himself is bodily yanked from the boat.

By the time Goodsir's eyes are open Diggle is gone, gone in an eyeblink, and he is dead as well. Just as Bryant had been when he was snatched in an instant from the false security of the hunting blind all those months ago.

The bear is not trying for stealth anymore, nor is it any longer in a frenzy. It is grunting on every exhale, softly, and softer each time, and it is pacing. Calming. Circling the sledge with slow, scraping steps.

Goodsir's breath has frozen in his lungs. He curls as small as possible against the inside curve of the hull. He cannot stand to shut his eyes again, and soon they are stinging and watering, and tears are streaking down his face.

When the whimper escapes him his racing heart misses a beat and covers his mouth with his hand.

Silence, again. Dire, unearthly silence.

He cannot comprehend how such a massive, powerful creature can be so quiet. There is only the faint moan of the wind, and the oppressive white sky overhead, and the clutter of hastily packed supplies which take up most of the space in the boat into which Goodsir is wedged. Even everything right before him, the packs and canvas and the unpolished inside of the boat, is hazy with mist, and wavering with the tears occluding Goodsir's vision. The flat light breaking and refracting into sundogs of despair.

Goodsir waits. He shivers and cries in utter silence until the silence itself presses in on him, just as the fog and the cold does, just as the fear does. It is a physical pressure in his eardrums, and it is the blockage in his throat. The clench in his guts and the numbness in his fingers. It is worming its way into his every molecule. Like rot into an apple. Like lead into the tissues. Like infirmity into the mind.

“Please,” he whispers, when he can withstand it no more, and the entire sledge heaves around him.

He cannot grab onto anything before he is airborne and then tumbling hard to the ground.

He comes to a jarring stop on his belly. The shale cuts the point of his chin open, but the moment he gets his bearings he drops his face back against the stones and covers his head with his arms. As if that would be enough to hide him. Upon regaining his breath he cannot help but sob with the pain; the rocks are unforgiving against his body, jagged against his roiling stomach. His ribs and one of his knees are screaming with injury and his ears are ringing.

“Please,” he says again. He wants it to be swift. He so very shamefully wants it to be swift and _over._

From beneath the crook of his elbow he sees its paw plant itself close beside his head. There is an odd configuration to the toes, an articulated length reminiscent of grasping digits despite the fearsome scimitar claws tipping them, and the whole foot spreads out broader than a dinner plate. There is scarlet clumped in the fur. Glinting slick on the black claws.

Humid, rancid breath puffs against the back of Goodsir's neck, ruffling his hair and insinuating itself beneath his collar. He shrinks even flatter, cringing. Every hair on his body prickles to attention and his skin is left colder in the wake of the damp heat. He is beyond mere fear, now.

The whuff of breath comes again, almost scalding and laden with the stench of old meat, and it occurs to Goodsir that the creature is, for lack of a better term, _nuzzling_ him. Or smelling him, at least. Taking in his scent.

He has to strangle the unhinged urge to ask the creature what it is doing and why it hasn't killed him yet.

The thought of cats tormenting their captured mice keeps him from daring to do so. The more intelligent the predator, the more inclined it is to play with its food, and Lord knows that the Tuunbaq has proven itself very cunning indeed. There are accounts of even ordinary bears making toys of animal parts. There is no reason for the Tuunbaq not to have realized that Goodsir is too weak to pose any challenge should it want to engage in a bit of recreational sport. Perhaps bat him around. Let him try to run only to tackle him again. Take him apart limb by limb until it is too bored to bother continuing.

Goodsir flinches when he feels that enormous mouth open over the back of his neck. Wet teeth skim against him, the gross hint of a soft, slimy tongue curling away as its jaws gape easily across the span of Goodsir's body, encompassing the stem of his spine at the vulnerable point where the vertebrae yearn up to meet his fragile skull. He has never felt so small.

The teeth slide down and the jaws begin to shut, and Goodsir thinks that this is it. This is finally it, and perhaps it will be merciful after all.

They close around the back of his collar and he is lifted almost gently to his knees. Goodsir gasps before his collar chokes him, but it is only for a moment before he is set down to find his own swaying balance on his uninjured leg. Cats occur to him again as the bear bears him upwards with as much careless parental tenderness as a mother feline might in righting her kitten by the scruff. As if he is some weightless, helpless thing; but a weightless thing to be picked up, and a helpless thing to be helped.

The creature's chest takes up the entirety of his vision. It is within arm's reach, and here the white fur has mostly fallen away, the skin left bare in light patches of pastel colorlessness, marred with scorchmarks and scars, smudged with soot and specks of blood. The skin is sagging a bit over the dense definition of the musculature. The huge chest moves in time with the gusts of breath through its nose, which Goodsir can still feel on the back of his neck until it lets him go and backs away. He blinks as its shadow and presence recedes.

He does not look into its face. He knows far better than to meet its eyes.

Yet even so he can make out the broad strokes of its odd physiognomy. Its eyes piggishly small and pale, its snout wide and blunt, its ears set far down on either side of its head and shaped utterly unlike a bear's. Shaped like a human's.

There is a human shape to it.

It is a human spirit, possibly, which has dressed in this way, and this is what breaks Goodsir's composure.

The sobs rattle through him, tear up his throat, and burst free into inelegant wails which he stifles again as quickly as he can.

“I'm sorry,” he says, through his uneven sobbing. “I'm sorry.”

The Tuunbaq snarls, the noise reverberating through it with the celestial resonance of thunder through clouds, its disconcerting face twisting into a sneer.

“I'm sorry,” Goodsir repeats, and, despite himself, he meets the Tuunbaq's gaze.

It has whites around the ice-green of its eyes, and the finest fringe of ash blond eyelashes. Suffering and malevolence has carved itself deep into the lines of its expression, but there is a comprehension and an awareness in its eyes to rival that of the smartest of men.

Goodsir is a naturalist. He understands that animals rarely attack without provocation. And any animal, man or otherwise, is wont to defend itself.

He understands.

“You need to go back to her,” says Goodsir. “Please. Please, kill me, if you will, but you need each other. You need her.”

The Tuunbaq snarls again, lips curling away from the ivory pegs of its teeth. There are gaps between them which remind Goodsir, ludicrously, of Captain Crozier's. Humanlike teeth, as well. And gums as dark as Morfin's.

“Please,” Goodsir implores, and then he bows his head in acceptance of whatever justice the Tuunbaq deems fit to dispatch in favor of Goodsir's temerity.

There is another huff of breath so strong that Goodsir's hair is blown back from his face for a moment. And then the creature backs a little further away, and, casual as a lady out for a summer stroll, it turns and fades into the fog.

Goodsir remains where he is until darkness falls.

 

~~~

 

He does not know where he is, and he is unable to read the charts which Gibson must have stolen from the command tent, especially when he finds the compass smashed beyond repair. Goodsir takes a pack and fills it with as much of the biscuits and salt pork as he can and then he strikes out in what he can only pray is the right direction.

With the mist gone, the arctic landscape is, to his eye, just as featureless. Rolling hills and milky shale as far as can be seen.

It is slow going with his knee. It is only wrenched, and with the brace he makes and the salves in his medical supplies he is able to walk on it, but even modern medicine can only go so far. At least two of his ribs are fractured, as well, and he has a good many bruises which go bone-deep. Even breathing is a trial.

He nonetheless manages to limp along for the whole of the first day.

He pays for it by the second, when his pain has multiplied tenfold and he must stop every few steps to rest. He's lectured patients before on the dangers of overexertion. There really are so many things about which he should have known better.

Within the first week he is hopelessly lost, is down a third of his rations, and can no longer inhale or take a step without causing himself blinding agony. But at least the cut on his chin has closed up.

 

~~~

 

The days blur together, and then the nights do, too. He tries to count them on his fingers and toes until he loses a few to frostbite and must amputate them himself. It is summer but he is sleeping without a shelter. Only a sack, and all his clothes, bedded down on the hard, cold ground.

He buries the toes and the tip of the pinkie finger and has himself a little service each time. Imagines Sir John giving one of his beautiful eulogies over the tiny cairn of skipping-type stones and must restrain his hysterics.

His stomach goes emptier and emptier, day after day, and he can feel his body turning in on itself for nutrients, his every reserve depleting. The first hurts never heal so much as to disappear, but over time they fade, and are met and accompanied by innumerable smaller hurts. He grows dizzy, and unable to concentrate.

When he reaches into his pack for a morsel, a _crumb_ of food, and finds it all gone, he cannot understand what has happened for several minutes and is reduced to staring dumbly down into the empty canvas.

Empty. Empty like his stomach, and like the land, and like his mind. Everything is so empty, now.

The stars are brighter each night. He bundles himself up until only his eyes are peeking out from all his layers and he gazes up at them. At how vividly the diamonds of them sparkle against the incomparable velvet backdrop of black, so very, endlessly dark and deep. Every constellation is shifted into something strange. It takes him time to recognize anything from the Scotland skies besides the moon's smooth-cut face.

He wonders what the moon might signify in Lady Silence's culture. He never asked her of the night sky and all its wonders when they spoke. He remembers her smile. The way he could coax it from her when he finally found the correct pronunciation of an Inuktitut word, and how she would sometimes grace him with it when he merely tried his stumbling, earnest best.

He begins to dream of her. They are back on the ship, in the small, cozy, golden-lit space, where they were warm, and where they spent so much time together. Where he had gained the precious gift of her trust.

He remembers her holding him after Morfin's death. In his dreams he is in two places; the ship, and the present upon the stones, where she is holding him as she did then, soothing his shivering and shielding him from the elements as best she can. As much as she can when she is not really there at all.

He points out the stars to her, and she teaches him what they are called. She does not speak aloud, as she never does anymore, but that is all right. It is only a dream, and most dreams are beyond words.

She puts her warm hand to his cold cheek and he knows that the two of them are more than words, now.

Goodsir thinks he is still dreaming of her when he sees her during the day. She is far away, for once, standing atop a distant ridge. The Tuunbaq is standing beside her, as comfortably as an old friend, and there is no blood on its face or on its claws. Its fur is growing back fuzzy over much of its denuded skin, and it practically gleams with health, clean and calm and immense.

She comes to him, running to meet him even as the Tuunbaq remains behind, as watchful and still as a marble guardian.

Goodsir would run to meet her, as well, but it is all he can do to totter his way forth. She has never looked so solid and so radiant as she does now, and he can barely take his eyes away from her to glance at his feet and keep himself from tripping. He is pulled as inexorably towards her as a moth is toward flame. It is something instinctual, something as essential as the very drive to live. She _is_ his life, and with her before him he must go to her.

His knees buckle just before they meet and he falls heavily into her arms, and it is only then, as she is holding him up and crying and crushing him to her chest, her thick furs soft and blessedly warm all around him, her chin pressed hard against the top of his head and an escaped wisp of her hair caught in his mouth and her body firm and _real_ against his, that he realizes this is not a dream.

“I love you,” Goodsir says, because he never thought he would have the chance to tell her. He never thought that he would live in a time of miracles such as this; such as any of this. Such as _her._

She nods to show him she understands, her face burrowing into his curls, and a giddy laugh of tremendous, breathless relief is forced out of him when she tightens her arms to hold him all the more closely.

 

 


End file.
